Steve Cohen’s Week Is Looking Up

Yes, tje jury has been selected for a trial against the guy who is alleged to have orchestrated “the most lucrative insider trading scheme ever,” AKA his former employee, Mathew Martoma. Yes, Frontline just aired a special on him that was not exactly flattering. Yes, he just had to slash the price of his Manhattan penthouse to $98 million from $115 million. Yes, his ex-wife is still alive. But thanks to a li’l company Intercept Pharmaceuticals Inc, he just scored himself 200 million pick-me-ups.

The hedge fund owned almost 1 million Intercept shares as of Nov. 7, translating to an intraday gain of more than $200 million if the stake is unchanged, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Other winners of the Intercept rally include Fidelity, the second-biggest U.S. mutual fund manager, and OrbiMed Advisors LLC. Intercept said today that a trial of its liver disease drug worked well enough for the testing to be stopped. Shares in the company had rallied 54 percent in the six months through yesterday as investors bought the stock in anticipation of a positive result…Intercept, which is based in New York, soared 283 percent to $277.02 at 3:02 p.m., its largest-ever increase. Trading volume soared to a record 6.2 million shares, almost 30-fold the three-month average.

The more frequently you monitor your portfolio, the more likely you are to observe a loss. This is likely to cause short-sighted decisions and could hurt your investment performance. If you are checking your portfolio more than once per quarter, you’re doing it too much.